Birds
make their nests, rabbits dig their burrows, squirrels make food supplies,
crows make tools to solve their problems, ants raise and defend aphids to feed
on the molasses they produce, the big ones felines hunt by gathering herds of
antelopes or zebras to isolate an individual, bears destroy wild hives to take
honey, cormorants sin, cats play with their victims, tuna hunt randomly in the
gigantic benches of herring, killing thousands, some animals even associate to
gain efficiency in the hunt.

So
see the struggle and the fate of this flying fish fleeing madly in front of a
much more powerful predator.

Which
does not mean that we have to inflict pain to the animal by killing it.

Many
current ideological movements (especially concerning food) are in the
background absurd because they are a denial of Nature.

How
can one claim to respect nature when one refuses to accept human nature?

Humans
have only reproduced and adapted what usually happens in nature. The
peculiarity is that a single animal species, thanks to the atypical development
of his brain, has succeeded in gathering the majority of capacities of other
animals.

Human
has always sought to protect himself from nature because it is not good, it is
wild, cruel and dangerous for its members.

He
invented clothes to protect himself from cold and sun

He
invented shoes to protect his feet,

He
invented weapons to hunt more powerful animals,

He
learned to domesticate fire to heat himself, to scare his own predators and to
cook his food,

He
built houses to shelter from rain, snow, wind and wild animals,

He
invented the lightning rod to protect himself from lightning,

He
has tamed and domesticated animals to relieve himself of the most difficult
tasks, and to be able to move,

Inventing
all these incredible things developed him intelligence, and he invented
techniques to improve and modernize all previous inventions.

But
basically, all that for what?

To
protect himself.

This
fundamental and visceral need for protection allowed him to evolve and develop
his intelligence. And he did the same that all living things in nature: he used
nature for his own needs.

Now
it is fashionable to want to return to an agriculture that does not disturb the
balance of nature. This idea is based in particular on the concept that nature
is good, and on the other hand, what nature does is perfect.

It's
very questionable.

Andrew
McGuire, an agronomist at the WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural
Resources, wrote an interesting article in 2014, originally published on the
website of the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources of the
University of Washington, under the title "Don't Mimic Nature on the Farm,
Improve it", (http://csanr.wsu.edu/dont-mimic-nature-improve-
it /).

I
take only the conclusion, in my opinion fundamental to understand that our
agriculture must continue its evolution:

“If what we see in natural
ecosystems is not optimized, but random (stochastic, say the ecologists), we
should be able to do just as well or better. We can, with ingenuity, wisdom,
and a good dose of humility, purposefully assemble systems that outperform
natural ecosystems in providing both products and ecosystem services. By taking
advantage of individual species’ properties and processes, and by managing
abiotic conditions (soil physical and chemical properties and water levels,
etc.) we can create designer agro-ecosystems, successful by criteria that
matter in agriculture; productivity, efficiency, and stability. I propose that
this is, in fact, what we have been doing all along (more on this my follow-up
post), and that the “balance of nature” has only been a distraction from our
efforts to improve the sustainability of our agriculture, a distraction that
should be decisively cast aside.”

“If nature has not been optimized
by any process that we know of, and therefore consists of mostly random mixes
of species dictated primarily by natural disturbances, then there is no reason
to “follow nature’s lead.”But if we
don’t, what are we left with?

We are left with an agriculture
based on human ingenuity, consisting of:

Crop rotations, or better yet,
dynamic crop sequences;

Residue management and no-till
planting to keep the soil covered and control erosion;

Careful use of synthetic
fertilizers in conjunction with organic fertilizers;

Cover crops and green manures,
including cover crop cocktails; this is where we can study unused and underused
species to take advantage of “nature’s wisdom.”Precision crop planting in sequence with cover crops could potentially
improve cover cropping benefits by allowing crop roots to advantageously
colonize the root channels of the dead cover crops (i.e., sequential root
channel colonization).

Integrated pest management
including the use of improved pesticides.

GMO crops, including cover crops.

All these practices could be more
widely used and more effectively applied.

[…]

Another benefit gained by casting
aside “the romantic notions of a stable Eden” is that it should make us less
susceptible to “silver bullet” solutions, wishful thinking and other such
nonsense. In my experience, this is most needed in soil and pest management.
There are no quick, easy, and cheap methods to improve soils. It takes bulk
organic materials, either grown on-site (less expensive) or imported (more
expensive). In the long-term, the nutrients that are harvested in the crop must
be replaced; they cannot be produced by “better biology.” For insects, weeds, and
disease, no amount of tweaking the system will make them go away.

There are those who will find this
whole notion yet another example of arrogant man trying to control nature, and
there are plenty of examples of where we have done a poor job at managing the
Earth. However, we must realize that farming is controlling nature for our own
purposes. We still need nature, and “wild” places, but unless critics can point
to a mechanism by which natural ecosystems were consistently improved, we
should not use them as blueprints for agriculture, nor should we assume that we
cannot improve on them. There is no utopian state of nature, so we can stop
trying to restore, recover, or regain any such state in agriculture. There is
no way back, but there is a way forward.”

Our
agriculture must continue to evolve. We went from a traditional agriculture
totally exposed to the vagaries of nature, to a productivist agriculture,
conceptually extracted from this same nature. It is obvious to anyone who wants
to think about it, that it was a mistake.

But
a revolution always goes through extreme phases. The French Revolution, founder
of a large part of the modern political ideologies, caused terrible collateral
damage, was the scene of all kinds of settling of scores, was the origin of
hundreds of thousands of victims, innocent of the misdeeds which they were
accused of.

But
it was necessary to go through these frightening steps to establish a democracy
in which the small gift to politicians is a clear sign of patronage and corruption.

In
agriculture, it's the same thing.

We
have lived for centuries with a traditional and fragile agriculture, difficult
and unproductive, alternating phases of overproduction with phases of famine.

Then,
succeeding the Industrial Revolution, arrived the Green Revolution, steeped in
good intentions, and catastrophic in many ways. Yet this much-maligned
revolution has launched a fundamental movement of research, experimentation and
understanding of the phenomena to which our food production is linked.

We
are currently in a reverse balance movement, which tends to bring us back to a
time when modernity is understood as synonymous with pollution, aberration.

But
inevitably, the future will show us that the truth is not there. The production
of food has an imperative need of modernity in all points of view.

But
the preservation of our environment is also a condition of sustainability, not
only of our agriculture, but also of the human species and other living
species.

The
future is NECESSARILY in a middle ground, both modern and productive, and at
the same time respectful of the environment, biodiversity, water and soil.

But
organic farming, currently, is not able to propose a proper combination of all
these criteria.

It
is Integrated Production that allows it, or agroecology, depending on how we
want to name it.

Because
let's be very clear, recourse to synthetic chemistry is sometimes a necessity,
not in any way, of course, but we must protect our agriculture from the
aggressions of nature. It's a question of ecology.

Yes,
I know, some won't appreciate. However, producing a lot on a small surface is
the best way to respect natural areas not devoted to agriculture.

Productivism
is not polluting if it's well managed, it's even the opposite.

Humans
kill plants and animals that they have previously allowed to live. That's how
we feed ourselves.

And
I don't see a humanity of 7.5 billion inhabitants, and increasing, of which
more than half are city dwellers, return to a hunter-gatherer status.

Nature
is not good. It is not bad either. She is just Nature, always divided between
life and death. The death of some is the life insurance of others. That's the
way it is. It's the law of nature.

What
is complicated for farmers is to solve the difficult equation of an optimized
production with very small side effects, in order to respect Nature at best.